Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Are you a parent/therapist/teacher of a child with autism? Please help our research by giving your opinion!
Currently we are investigating if social robots like the robot Probo can be used for children with autism. Social robots are robots that can communicate in a social way with speech, emotions and gestures. Since we want to include the opinion of you as parent/therapist/teacher to make the technology as suitable as possible for the children, we ask you to fill in the following questionnaire, it takes less than 15 minutes. As such we can include your requirements, desires and ethical concerns in the design of novel interventions assisted with robots. This research is a joint collaboration between engineers of the VUB, therapists/psychologists of UBB and ethicists from Utwente. Thanks a lot for your kind participation!
Click here for the Dutch questionnaire.Click here for the Romanian questionnaire.Click here for the English questionnaire.

Probo in the media

Probo

Probo is an intelligent huggy robot that is developed as research platform to study cognitive human-robot interaction (cHRI) with a special focus on children. The robot Probo is designed to act as a social interface, providing a natural interaction while employing human-like social cues and communication modalities. The robot has a fully actuated head, with 20 degrees of freedom, capable of showing facial expressions. A remarkable feature is the moving trunk and the soft and huggable jacket. A user friendly Robotic User Interface (RUI) enables the operator to control the robot.

Multidisciplinary team

Probo is developed by the Robotics & Multibody Mechanics research group (R&MM)
of the Engineering Faculty at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). A strong multidisciplinary team has been formed to further extend the capabilities of the robot. The robot will be used as a research platform to gradually incorporate more autonomy and intelligence. Probo is made accessible to the scientific community so that it can play a supportive research role in technical areas (such as vision, speech, AI and cognition), medical areas (exploration of Robotic Assisted Therapy (RAT)) and social/psychological areas (focus on HRI and emotional communication).

If interested to be a partner in the project please feel free to contact us.